From the Beast to the Blonde

by Marina Warner

  CHAPTER EIGHT: THE GLASS PAVING AND THE SECRET FOOT

  1 John Donne: ‘Tell me where all past years are,/ Or who cleft the Devil’s foot …’, ‘Song’, NOEV, 184.

  2 Sheba … in the Koran: ‘The Ant’, The Koran, tr. N. J. Dawood (Harmondsworth, 1972), 82–4; St. John Philby, 43–52.

  3 beetle for her lunch: J. C. Mardrus, The Queen of Sheba Translated into French from his own Arabic text (London, 1918); tr. E. Powys Mathers (London, 1924), 63.

  4 ‘… Lord of the creation’: Koran, ibid., 84.

  5 suffers from hairy legs: The extant sources of the Arabic story include Al-Tabari [b.838], Annals; Abu Mansur al-Tha’labi [b.1038] and Izz al-Din Ibn al-Athir [b.1160], see St John Philby, 43–9.

  6 lime and arsenic: After this some versions continue, ‘He smeared her with it and washed her and her hair fell off. Then he had intercourse with her right away.’ The Alphabet of Ben Sira, tr. and ed. Norman M. Bronznick, in Fiction (Rabbinic Fantasy), VII, nos. 1, 2 (New York, 1983), 99–135.

  7 stork or an ostrich: Chiara Settis Frugoni, ‘Per una Lettura del mosaico pavimentale della Cattedrale di Otranto’(Rome, 1968), Bullettino dell’Istituto storico Italiano per il Medio Evo e Archivio Muratoriano, 80, 213ff; Carl Arnold Willemsen, L’Enigma di Otranto: Il mosaico pavimentale del presbitero Pantaleone nella Cattedrale (Otranto, 1980).

  8 ‘… longed-for sight of the female member’: ‘Fetishism’ (1927), FSE, XXI, 152–7.

  9 ‘feet’ here stand for sexual organs: My thanks to Scott Mandelbrote for pointing this out to me. I have quoted the Jerusalem Bible because the Authorized Version, reiterating the euphemism, treats the seraphim as male angels. See Rooth, 104–5, on shoes’ symbolism.

  10 neither a siren song: John Skelton noted, ‘He [the ostrich] cannot well fly/ Nor sing tunably …’, ‘Philip Sparrow’, NOEV, 29.

  11 have cloven feet: Linnaeus calls the bird ‘Struthio camelus’ for this reason; Rowland (1978), 55.

  12 ‘… which are crested and fly’: St Jerome, Letter 21: 13, 4, quoted Paul Antin, ‘Les Sirènes et Ulysse dans l’oeuvre de S. Jérome’, Revue des études Latines, xxxix (1961), 232–41.

  13 ‘… bestial forms of angels or demons …’: ibid., 233.

  14 ‘… the songs of poets’: St Jerome, Letter 21: 13, 4, quoted Antin, op. cit., 238.

  15 ‘… difficult to keep one’s modesty’: St Jerome, Letter 117: 6, 4, quoted Antin, op. cit., 235.

  16 The Queen of Sheba … had webbed feet: Honorius Augustodunensis, ‘Saba quoque Ethiopissa et regina quoque et Sibilla habens pedes anserinos’. See W. Hertz, 23–4, Overgaard, xxv.

  17 a drawing from 1739 survives: Dom Urbain Plancher, Histoire générate et particulière de Bourgogne (Dijon, 1739), reproduced in Isabelle Grange, ‘Métamorphoses chrétiennes des femmes-cygnes: Du folklore à l’hagiographie’, Ethnologie française xiii (1983), 2, 139–47, 143.

  18 ‘… Sibilla was filled with joy’: ‘Sibyllen Weissagung’, ed. I. Neske, Göppinger Arbeiten zur Germanistik 438 (Göppingen, 1985). Peter Dronke directed me to this poem; without his help I would never have read it. He also generously translated the relevant verses for me.

  19 many interpreters: See also O. Schade, ‘Sibillen Boich’, in O. Schade, Geistliche Gedichte des XIV, und XV Jahrhunderts vom Niederrhein (Hanover, 1854), 293–332, for two prints of 1513 and 1515 from Cologne which reprise the story and the message.

  20 hellfire for those who do not: Sibillen Weissagen (Ulm, 1492), Berliner Stadtsbibliothek. See Drucke von Johann Schaffler (Ulm, 1498), iii, pl. 106;

  21 recognizing the bridge: Faber, op. cit., 522.

  22 playwright Terence: Heinrich Steinhowel, translator of Aesop and Boccaccio is said to be portrayed as Terence, and Hans Neithard, the humanist mayor, as Cicero. Wolfgang Lipp, Guide to Ulm Cathedral (Ulm, 1991), 20; see also Reinhard Wortmann, Das Ulmer Münster (Stuttgart, 1972).

  23 Jörg Syrlin strategically placed: See Reinhard Workmann, Das Ulmer Münster (Stuttgart, 1972), and Wilhelm Vöge, Jörg Syrlin der Altere und Seine Bildwerke, (2 vols, Berlin, 1950).

  24 Boec van der Houte: Historia Sanctae Crucis or Boec van den Houte (Kuilenburg, 1483); The Legendary History of the Cross, ed. and pub. John Ashton (London, 1887), intro. Sabine Baring-Gould.

  25 Thomas Malory rather than The Golden Legend: See ch.7.

  26 torture of the Sibyl: In the 1887 facsimile, the beautiful young Sibyl tied to a stake and beaten by the miscreant unbelievers has an ordinary shaped foot – so imagine my delight then when I went to the King’s Library in The Hague to see an original copy, printed by John Veldenaer in 1483, and found there, her foot is visibly splayed, long and webbed. Ashton commissioned M. J. Ph. Berjeau to make the facsimile woodcuts, and he must have misunderstood this distorted shape in the original (in the verses attached, her goosefoot is not mentioned).

  27 ‘… hands or the feet’: A Marvellous History of Mary of Nimmegen, tr. Harry Moragan Ayres (The Hague and London, 1923), 12.

  28 listing to the left: F. Saxl, ‘A Spiritual Encyclopaedia of the Later Middle Ages’, JWCI, V (1942), 82–134. See for instance the woodcuts to Ulrich Molitor, De Lamiis et Phitonicis Mulieribus (Basel, 1495).

  29 ‘lust scatters all that it possesses’: Mitologiarum libri tres, ed. R. Helm (Leipzig, 1898), II.viii, 48–9. I am most grateful to Nick Havely for this citation.

  30 ‘… cats’ paws or horses’ hooves’: Ginzburg, 122.

  31 girls to seduce victims: Graves, I, 189–90.

  32 witch of the title: Games and Songs of American Children, ed. William Wells Newell and Carl Withers (New York, 1963), 215–21.

  33 defects as splay feet: See John Gross, Shylock: Four Hundred Years in the Life of a Legend (London, 1992), 297–8.

  34 from her rump: F. Saxl, ‘Illustrated Pamphlets of the Reformation’, Lectures (London, 1957), I, 255–66, pls. 179a, c.

  35 ‘… Then womans shape would beleeve to bee Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. J. W. Hales (2 vols, London, 1966), Canto II, XLI, i, 41.

  36 ‘… yet never living creature saw’: ibid., Canto VIII, XLVIII, i, 115.

  37 women’s vulvae speak: Irwin, 239, perceptively places Diderot in the tradition of the wonder tale.

  38 did not complete it: Storer, 144.

  39 Adenet le Roi: Adenes li Rois, Li Roumans de Berte aus Grans Pies, ed. A. Scheler (Brussels, 1874); Berlioz, et al., 165–72. See also Gaston Paris, Histoire poétique de Charlemagne (Paris, 1865), and id., ‘La Légende de Pepin “Le Bref”’, in Mélanges Julien Havet (Paris, 1895).

  40 ‘… dame de son courant’: ‘Berta da li pè grandi’ in ‘Le Geste Francor’ di Venezia, ed. Aldo Rosellini (Brescia, 1986), lines 1301–2.

  41 La Reine Pédauque: No images have survived, unfortunately. But Rabelais reported seeing one in Toulouse, and sculptures from St Pierre in Nevers and at Nesles-la-Reposte and St Pourçain in Burgundy were described and drawn by different sources. See Emile Mâle, L’Art religieux du 12e siècle en France (Paris, 1940), 394ff.

  42 Flor and Blancheflor … star-crossed love: See Charles Méla, Blanchejleur et le saint homme ou la semblance des reliques: Etude comparée de littérature médiévale (Paris, 1979); the medieval romance was translated, as a book for children: The Sweet and Touching Tale of Fleur and Blanchefleur, tr. Mrs Leighton, illus. Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale (London, 1922).

  43 ‘daughter of the King of Hungary’: See Schlauch, 62–78, 132–4; Godefroy of Viterbo, Speculum Regum, towards the end of the C12th, wrote an early version; Alexandre Eckhardt, De Sicambria à sans-souci: Histoires et légendes franco-hongroises (Paris, 1943), 96–100.

  44 ‘powerful athlete of Christ’: See Les Belles Heures du Due de Berry, intro. James J. Rorrimer, notes Margaret B. Freeman (London, 1959), fo. 174, where the Limbourg Brothers have depicted the Suffrage of Saint Charlemagne.

  45 defamed or otherwise wronged wife: Schlauch, passim, esp. 54–6, 62–78, 120–3; AT 403, 450, 706. Vincent of Beauvais included in the Speculum His
toriale a pious version, in which the victim is rescued by the Virgin Mary; the story was not often represented, but it was painted on the walls of Eton College Chapel (mostly now covered over) and was sculpted in the C15th in Norwich Cathedral. See M. R. James, The Sculptured Bosses in the Roof of the Bauchun Chapel of Our Lady of Pity in Norwich Cathedral (Norwich, 1908).

  46 ‘… a mark of her higher nature’: Grimm, I, 279ff.

  47 woman who works a spinning wheel: See Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, 5, part 9 (Cambridge, 1988), 163–9. The earliest images in the West appear in the windows of Chartres, c. 1240–5; Leonardo drew one of the most advanced ideas of his time for combined spindle, bobbin, and flyer, c. 1490 in the Codex Atlanticus.

  CHAPTER NINE: ON RIDDLES, ASSES AND THE WISDOM OF FOOLS

  1 ‘Kneeling shows the female sex’: Ostoia, 73ff., gives the fullest and most inspiring account of these legends and their expressions.

  2 beliefs about Solomon’s wizardry: Innocent III had Le Livre de Salomon burned in 1359, for instance, though a first edition – magically – appears in Rome in 1629, Grillot de Givry, E.-J., Le Musée des sorciers, mages et alchimistes (Paris, 1980), 86ff.

  3 forty-two similar posers: J. Archer Taylor, ‘Riddles dealing with Family Relationships’, JAF 51 (1938), 25–37, 27.

  4 Exeter Book of riddles: W. S. Mackie, The Exeter Book (Oxford, 1934).

  5 ‘… the others are opened’: From Yachya Ben Suleiman, ‘The Yemen Midrash (Hachephez): Commentary on the Pentateuch’ (c.1430), British Library, Oriental MS, 2351, 2380–82. See S. Schechter, ‘The Riddles of Solomon in Rabbinic Literature’, Folklore 1 (1890), 349–58; Daum, 106–8; Ostoia, 85.

  6 fast horses and other pleasures: J. B. Pritchard (ed.), Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament (Princeton, 1974), 72–3.

  7 as well as storytelling: Calderon de la Barca dramatized a riddle contest in La Sibila de Oriente y Gran Reina de Saba. Ostoia, 91.

  8 ‘… Roman pikemen and the dwarf’: Verklaringe van verscheyden kunst-rijeke wercken en hare bewinginghe, door oorlogie-werck ghedreven [Explanation of different art works and their movements, moved by clockwork … ], (Amsterdam, 1648). Ostoia, 82, alludes to the attraction, and I am very grateful indeed to Dimphena Groffen for finding the guide book and translating the passage for me.

  9 non-Christian trickery: Servatii Gallaeus, Dissertationes de Sibyllis, earumque oraculis (Amsterdam, 1688), 199–200.

  10 impossible tasks … of folk narrative: Bengt Holbek, ‘Hans Christian Andersen’s Use of Folktales’, in The Telling of Stories: Approaches to a Traditional Craft (Odense, 1990), 165–82, 174.

  11 ‘Serpentin vert’: Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, ‘The Great Green Worm’, tr. A. S. Byatt, WT, 189–229.

  12 poor peasant’s clever daughter: See Jones (1989); id., ‘Marcolf and the Bum in the Oven’; Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (London, 1993), 26–7, pl. 15, showing the early C14th Ormesby Psalter’s image of the solution. See also, ‘The Wise Little Girl’, in VFT-I, 28–30.

  13 ‘He flew away in a blazing flame’: In The Unco Knicht’s Wowing, CPB, I, 4–5; cf. Judith Weir’s libretto for her opera The Vanishing Bridegroom, part III, Scottish Opera, 1990, printed in Royal Opera House programme, n.p.

  14 ‘Profound, profound’: Colin Radford, ‘Wittgenstein and “Fairy Tales”’, in MC, II, 2 (Dec. 1988), 106–10.

  15 gives the right solutions: Puccini’s librettists were Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni, and their immediate source was Carlo Gozzi’s play of 1761; one of the earliest extant literary versions is ‘The Story of Prince Calaf’, early C13th, Persian. See Irwin, 101; also Mike Ashman,’ From Peking to Milan’, in programme of Turandot, Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, 1993.

  16 her sex is put to the proof: AT, 514; ‘Marmoisan, ou l’Innocente tromperie’, LHBI, 3–66; see Caroline Trost, ‘Belle-Belle ou le Chevalier Fortuné: A Liberated Woman in a Tale by Mme d’Aulnoy’, MC, v, 1 (May 1991), 57–67.

  17 spoofs this basic convention of romance: ‘Histoire de la Marquise-Marquis de Banneville’, Le Mercure galant, Feb. 1695; see Ranjit Bolt (tr.), ‘The Counterfeit Marquise’, WT, 123–47.

  18 ‘churning tub’… beginning of the century: Icogniti scriptoris nova poemata enigmata, sive emblemata amatoria (Leiden, 1624), intro. Jochen Becker (Soest, 1972), n.p. Thanks to Mariët Westermann for drawing this edition to my attention.

  19 alone at her spinning: ibid., 26, 70–1.

  20 ‘It is a candle’: New Riddles (Derby, c. 1790), Osborne Collection, Toronto.

  21 which told riddles: A Book of Riddles was among the ten favourite chapbooks in the seventeenth century, see Watt, 270–1; e.g. Food for the Mind: or, a new Riddle Book (E. Newbery: London, 1778).

  22 ‘… in this riddle book’: The Riddle Book; or, Fireside Amusements (Derby, n.d), Osborne Collection, Toronto.

  23 commendable prophets: Daum, 57.

  24 precious to God in consequence: See L. Charbonneau-Lassay, La Mystérieuse emblématique de Jésus-Christ (Milan, 1940), 224–233.

  25 add their voices to the chorus: Dronke (1992), 228; Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church (Oxford, 1933), 2, 126–31.

  26 ‘… like someone crazed’: Young, op. cit., 145.

  27 with a drawn sword: ibid., 152; see also William Hone, Ancient Mysteries Described: especially the English Miracle Plays including … the Festivals of Fools and Asses … (London, c. 1825), 160–6. My thanks to Peter Hay for bringing this entertaining miscellany to my notice.

  28 then provides the solutions: op. cit. The Riddle Book; or, Fireside Amusements.

  29 classicists are still reviewing: See Lucian of Samosata, ed. M. D. Macleod (London, 1967), Lucius, or the Ass, intro., 47–51; Perry, 211–82.

  30 formation of fairy tale: Perry, ibid. ; Hägg, 182–6; Reardon, 44–5.

  31 ‘no vice of which I am less guilty’: Lucien, Histoire véritable, tr. Perrot d’Ablancourt [1654] (Arles, 1988).

  32 ‘…a reed for a mast’: ibid., 27.

  33 that most famous of fairy plays: See Jan Kott, The Bottom Translation: Marlowe and Shakespeare and the Carnival Tradition, tr. Daniela Miedzyrzecka and Lillian Vallee (Evanston, 1987), 29–68.

  34 ‘… ass his master’s crib’: Les Pensées chrétiennes de Charles Perrault: Papers on French seventeenth century literature, ed. Jacques Barchilon and Catherine Velay-Vallantin (Paris, Seattle, Tübingen, 1987), 75–80.

  35 ‘…I should cry out indeed!’: ‘Li Response du Bestiare’, in Richard de Fournival, Li Bestiare d’amours/Il bestiario d’amore, ed. Francesco Zambon (Parma, 1987), 96, lines 20–5.

  CHAPTER TEN: SWEET TALK, PLEASANT LAUGHTER

  1 ‘Aye, by-and-by’: ONR, 433–4. MGM has ‘a blanket’ instead of ‘a basket’, and other small variations.

  2 no further resistance: OM, XIV, 621–769, pp.328–32.

  3 The theme enters art: e.g. Paulus Morelsee [d.1638], Vertumnus and Pomona, Boymans van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam; Hugo von Hofmannsthal, in the libretto of Die Frau ohne Schatten (1919), borrows this stock character of the Nurse who speaks as a tempter.

  4 the voice of an old woman: A, 96.

  5 place and power of laughter: See Mihail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, tr. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington, 1984), 82ff.; Propp, ‘Ritual Laughter in Folklore’, in Propp (1984), 124–46.

  6 titter out of her: B, I, 3–12.

  7 prince of Camporotondo’s true bride: ibid., II, 533–5. 12.

  8 Baubô’s similar antics: See Propp, op. cit. (1984), 129 for related tales, including a remarkable Eskimo parallel in which the exposed woman is a ravenous goddess called Erdlaverissok (the disemboweller).

  9 youth with the flute: ‘Von der Königstochter die nie lachen wollte’ in Kroatische Volksmärchen, ed. Maja Bosovic-Stulli, tr. Antoinette Baker, quoted Baker, ‘“A Time to Laugh” A Study of Laughter: Its Psychology, and its Role in Analysis’ (Dipl. Thesis, Jung Institute, Zurich, 1980), 81–2;
the Grimms collected a cleaner version of this story, ‘The Golden Goose’, for their 1812 anthology, GZ, 256–9.

  10 ‘… unkindness of the real circumstances’: ‘Humour’, FSE, XXI, 161–6.

  11 potential for disruption and change: Cixous and Clément, 32–4.

  12 made her smile again, even laugh: Apollodorus, The Library, tr. J. G. Frazer (Harvard and London, 1921), bk 1, V, 36–7; see also C. G. Jung and C. Kerenyi, Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, tr. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, 1969), 130–1.

  13 ‘… from out the glancing cup’: Clement of Alexandria, Exhortation to the Greeks, ch. II, 17, ed. and tr. G. W. Butterworth (London and Cambridge, 1960), 40–3; Orphicum Fragmenta, ed. Otto Kern (Berlin, 1963), 128; Jung and Kerenyi, 244.

  14 ‘… jesting with made up stories’: Phaedrus, Prologue to bk III. Babrius and Phaedrus, ed. and tr. B. E. Perry (Harvard and London, 1965), 245–55.

  15 ‘Only equals may laugh’: Alexander Herzen, On Art (Moscow, 1954), 223, quoted Bakhtin, op. cit., 92.

  16 ‘… And make you laugh your Fill’: A Whetstone for Dull Wits or a Poesy of New and Ingenious Riddles, title page, CBK, 295.

  17 Fool’s … physical sides of the part: e.g. cross-dressed in King Lear, dir. Max Stafford-Clark, Royal Court, 1992.

  18 nursery rhymes, pantomime plots: e.g. MGM; Mother Goose, Mother Goose’s Melody: or, Sonnets for the Cradle (London, c. 1780); Histories of Past Times: Told by Mother Goose with Morals, Englished by G. M. Gent (Salisbury, 1802); Fairy Tales of past times from Mother Goose (Edinburgh, 1805, Glasgow, 1814); The History of the Celebrated Nanny Goose and the History of the Prince Renardo and the Lady Goosiana [1813] (Toronto, 1973); Old Mother Goose (Routledge 3d. Toy Book: London, n.d.); Kate Greenaway, Mother Goose, or the Old Nursery Rhymes (London, 1881); Familiar Selections from the Rhymes of Mother Goose, with new pictures by Chester Loomis (London, 1888), 154; Mother Goose’s Nursery Rhymes and Fairy Tales (London, 1892); Grandpapa Easy, Mother Goose and the Golden Eggs (London, n.d.); J. Barchilon and H. Pettit (eds), The Authentic Mother Goose Tales and Nursery Rhymes (Denver, 1960). See Humphrey Carpenter, ‘Mother Goose’, in Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature (Oxford, 1986), 362ff; Marina Warner, ‘Speaking with Double Tongue: Mother Goose and the Old Wives’ Tale’, in The Myths of the English, ed. Roy Porter (Cambridge, 1992), 33–67.